From Hedwig to Joe Exotic, John Cameron Mitchell never sold out. Has the world caught up with him or passed him by? MatthewSchneier reports
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In recent years, he has sustained himself as a character actor, a reliable source of slightly sour comic relief on TV shows including Girls, Shrill, and The Good Fight. “Acting is what pays the bills,” he says. “All the other stuff is too experimental or unusual” — collaborative albums, a narrative podcast featuring a singing brain tumor — “to actually make a living.”
On a visit to New Orleans in 2020, Mitchell was helping a friend look for a house when he decided to look for one too. New York used to be more hospitable to the kind of durably undomesticated, reliably provocative, comfortable-on-the-margins artist who, like Mitchell, kept his overhead low. “He’ll never give up his apartment,” his friend Paul Dawson told me. “It has been very important to him throughout his career and continues to be.
The nearby houses in Bywater, painted Necco Wafer shades of green, purple, and blue, are mostly single-story stand-alones, but Mitchell’s stands out and stands above: peachy yellow with orange and blue trim, double tall, and windows as high as most of its neighbors’ doors. Bywater is in the Ninth Ward but close enough to the higher-ground banks of the Mississippi that its flood risk is relatively low, and the neighborhood feels arty and boho.
Mitchell moved to New York in 1985 after studying theater at Northwestern University. Very quickly, he began booking parts on Broadway: understudying Huck Finn in Big River, playing Dickon in The Secret Garden. He might have had a polite, unexceptional theater career — he racked up respectable Drama Desk nominations — had he not begun developing the character of Hedwig with Trask at Squeezebox, a gay party in Siberian western Soho that mixed drag queens with rock and roll.
Over the years, Hedwig’s cult has spawned superfan Hedheads, countless tattoos, and, for Mitchell himself, more than one stalker. “It’s all ‘the freaks and the losers,’ you know,” Mitchell’s friend Amber Martin, a singer who now tours with him across the country for concert performances of the soundtrack, told me fondly. “They feel like they’re seen.”
Even Hedwig, which continues to be performed on professional and amateur stages around the world, doesn’t bring in enough in royalties to support him. “We’ve been doing this together since 1994 in some way or another,” Trask told me, and even so, “it’s not successful enough for us to hate each other.” Trask also left New York, in 2004. Today, he lives in Kentucky with his husband and works primarily on film scores.
At Q&As and talk-backs following the recent round of Shortbus screenings, Mitchell has found himself taken to task by those who don’t see themselves represented or who interpret the onscreen sex as exploitative rather than freeing. “The same night that someone said, ‘Is it your right to talk about an Asian woman having an orgasm?’ — a central plot point of the movie — someone else said, ‘Have you thought of remaking Hedwig with a more diverse cast?’ ” Mitchell says.
“Somebody had said during a Q&A, ‘Who are you to tell the Asian woman’s story?’ with the assumption that that’s not my story,” said Sook-Yin Lee, who overcame the objections of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, her employer at the time, to play Sofia, one of the main characters. “I created the character. That is my story.”
Mitchell isn’t nostalgic, exactly, but he has grown a bit cranky at being expected to watch what he says. Cranky, but also careful. “We’re in Wokeland now, so everyone’s on notice,” he says. “There is a bit of a cultural revolution. The kids-have-guns cult.” He dreams of a more peaceful revolution, an incremental revolution.
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